Dirty Laundry (5 page)

“That’s unfortunate, ma’am,” I said as gently as I could. “But that’s not your fault.”

“I could have warned her.” Madame Sun slammed her open hand on the coffee table, rattling our cups. “I felt something lingering over her. I should have known. She left my salon at noon and died twenty minutes later. What kind of man would kill a woman in the daylight for her car? The policeman I spoke to on the phone told me I was crazy.”

There was not a whisper from me that
crazy
had been my first reaction. My second too. Instead, I jotted down a note in my steno pad to follow up on the Choi investigation. “It sounds like an accident, Madame Sun. I’ll be glad to ask the police about what they’re doing, but I don’t know how—”

“There have been two others.” She leaned forward and pinned me in place with a hard look over her glasses. “Both dying after leaving my salon. May’s death might have been unfortunate, but the others right after her?
That
is something dark moving against me.”

I got details out of her concerning the other two deaths. Unlike May Choi, who’d come from Seoul a year ago, the others were Koreans who’d lived in America for many years. The second of Madame Sun’s clients to die was Eun Joon Lee, a housewife killed during an afternoon home invasion. Following her a few days later, Bhak Bong Chol, an elderly businessman, died of an apparent heart attack in his own office. Madame Sun gave me as many details as she could, including their addresses and how long they’d been her clients.

“Have you heard anything—from anyone—that might lead you to believe any of your other clients are in danger?” I didn’t want to open that Pandora’s box, but on the far off chance that she actually had concrete evidence of something going on, I had to ask.

“No, no, you cannot say anything. I don’t want to alarm anyone.” She shook her head, and not a single strand of her hair moved, although the beads on her glasses’ leash jingled pleasantly. “But yes, I have
felt
that more death is coming. It is all connected to me. I know it inside of me. Please, Mr. McGinnis, these people do not deserve to die because they come to me for advice.”

“No one deserves to die like that, Madame Sun,” I assured her. “And no, I won’t speak to any of your current clients. I just want to know if you’ve had anything concrete I could chase down.”

“My premonitions
are
concrete, but I understand what you think. You are not the first one I’ve met who does not believe. I don’t need you to believe, Mr. McGinnis. I just need… to make sure that the people I advise are safe. Will you need money to begin?” She reached into her bright pink alligator purse, and I stopped her with a shake of my head.

“No. Let’s see if I have something to investigate first. If I have something to chase after, I’ll call you and tell you what it’ll cost.”

I had no intention of charging her. It didn’t sound like a conspiracy or curse, just unfortunate circumstances arriving too close together for comfort. The case was going to be as profitable as Ava’s case but without the chocolate bar. It wouldn’t cost me anything to ring up a few cops and shake out some information, and at the end of the time I spent, Madame Sun would at least feel better. Time was a small price to pay for an older woman’s peace of mind, and time was something I had a lot of.

“Vivian—she helps me—call her if you need more information.” She stood up, creakily rubbing at her knee when she stepped out from around the table. “Her number is written there,
ne
? My son, James, is outside. I do not want to make him wait too long.”

“I’ll call you after I speak to the police and they have something I can share.” I saw her to the door, holding the screened panel open for her to pass through. She gave me a mumbled thank you, and I nodded at the middle-aged man waiting by the sedan parked at the curb.

Cops don’t like it when private investigators call them up and question them about their cases. Actually, no cop really likes having someone else’s nose peeking over their shoulder, but a follow-up wouldn’t be too out of the ordinary if I couched it as trying to calm a concerned elderly woman.

It took me about half an hour and more than a few transfers before I found myself speaking to Dexter Wong, a detective I’d become friends with. Wong’d handled the cleanup following my last case and caught the Choi investigation. When he answered the phone, he sounded slightly bemused to hear from me.

“A fortune-teller, huh?” I heard Wong tapping something against his desk. “My mother goes to one. She swears the old man helps her. I figure, if my mom wants to consult the I Ching, that’s her business. I wear my lucky socks when I play ball. Like I can throw stones? What can I help you with?”

I gave him what details I had, and Wong hummed over the line at me. “I’m not looking for much. Even if you guys don’t have any leads, I can tell her I spoke to you. She seemed nice enough, worried about her people. I thought I’d chat you up and maybe ease some of the pressure she’s feeling.”

“No, no… totally get that. I’ll tell you, but the details stay between us, McGinnis.” He continued after I murmured an agreement, “It’s down as a carjacking, but really, it’s a straight-up homicide. She was shot through the open window of her Beemer while at a light. Her purse was grabbed but dumped a few feet away. Guy left the car. Shooter did it in broad daylight. Witnesses say he was average height, wearing a black tank top and jeans. Ski mask so no one saw his face, but skin tone was tanned. Could be Asian or Hispanic descent. Happened off of Vermont, right at the edge of K-Town, so no one’s talking and no one’s pointing fingers. You know how that is.”

“Yeah, I worked areas like that in patrol. Seems kind of over the top just to grab a purse. How old was the Beemer?”

“New. It still had dealer plates on it. She was known for carrying large amounts of cash but not enough to get two bullets in her face.” Wong tsked. “I got a picture here. She was really pretty. Her husband’s tight-lipped, but he seemed upset by it when we talked to him. Still, he hasn’t called me up to ask how the case is going.”

“Could be he knows you don’t have a lot to go on.” I chewed on the end of my pen, then pulled it out of my mouth as if Claudia was next to me admonishing me not to get ink on my lip. The office was too quiet without her, and I was beginning to slip into the bad habit of opening up late.

“Maybe. But if I had a young, pretty wife shot to death, I’d be riding the cops’ asses until they gave me the name of the guy I could beat the shit out of for it.”

“What do you think? Was their marriage good?” I poked a hole at the husband’s grief. It was easier without him standing in front of me, a faceless man who possibly ordered his wife’s death.

“Seems like it,” Wong surmised. “Once again, hard to tell. Both came from Seoul. He’s older than she is by about eleven years, and she was young—barely twenty. He works the American end of his family’s import business. Choi’s lived here for about three years but went back over to Korea to get married.”

“Choi? She took his name?” I frowned when Wong confirmed it. “That’s odd. Thought most Korean women kept their names.”

“Could be because she’s living over here? Acclimating and all that,” he replied. “Her maiden name was Gangjun. That’s about it. If I get a break in this, I’ll let you know, but nothing much else to tell you.”

“Got anything on the other one? Eun Joon Lee?” I flipped through my notes. “The third name I got is Bhak, but he was a heart attack.”

“Someone else caught Eun Joon Lee.” Wong’s keyboard sounded like it was getting a workout. “There’s not much there either. Home invasion a few blocks away from Choi’s carjacking. They got some small electronics but no cash, and they left the jewelry. Husband thinks she walked in on them. We don’t have ballistics yet, but it looks like the same caliber as Choi’s. A nine millimeter, but that’s common.”

“Think anyone would look at you funny if you asked for a cross-reference between Choi and Lee?” It was a long shot. There were a lot of 9 mm handguns out on the streets of Los Angeles, and the odds of them being the same weapon were very slim.

“Wouldn’t hurt to ask. The lab usually looks out for that kind of thing for us, but it’s hit and miss. They’re overloaded.” Wong cleared his throat. “Look, I’ve got to bail. If you hear anything on your end, give me a call. If these two are connected, then we’ll have something to go on. I’ll look at the Madame Sun angle from my end, okay?”

“Thanks. I owe you a dinner.”

“Can I bring my girlfriend?” Wong teased. “You know, so you don’t get any ideas that it’s a date.”

“Sure, so long as I can bring Jae. You know, so you don’t get any ideas that you actually have a chance with me,” I countered.

“Great, now I’m going to really be the ugliest one at the table.”

“I’ll pick up the tab and buy you a beer.” I hung up after we made tentative plans for Korean barbeque. I sent Jae a text asking him about what days he was free, promising him he could pick the restaurant, so long as it was Korean.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t quite ready to put a pin in Madame Sun’s paranoid butterfly. The three deaths occurred in quick succession, spaced out over a few days, and from what I could see on an area map, very close together. It was odd for the jacker to leave a new BMW behind, and I wondered if he’d not planned on killing Choi. Wong’s eyewitness reports were pretty clear. The shooter walked up and shot Choi nearly point blank, then booked it through K-Town’s jungle of buildings.

“He knew she’d be there,” I mused, wheeling over to the coffee machine. “Someone knew her schedule. It feels more like a hit than something random.”

Not wanting to make a whole pot, I doctored up another cup of instant Vietnamese, then scooted across the floor to my desk. I was only able to wheel around the office when Claudia wasn’t there. I’d have to break the habit before she came back or I’d feel the flat side of her hand on the back of my head when I rolled past.

“Okay, so we’ve got a carjacking that leaves the car and takes only a purse.” The back of my leg began to itch, and I lifted my leg to lightly scratch at the denim over the bandaged area. “And a home invasion that leaves behind a shitload of jewelry but takes what’s out in the front rooms. Something stinks here, McGinnis.”

It got even stinkier when I heard my older brother Mike yelling my name as he came up the walk toward the office door. The porch rattled a bit from his stomping feet, and the screen door screeched in protest when he yanked it open. As usual, his hair was a prickly cactus of black spikes, and the glower on his face was an impressive display of curved lines and gritted teeth. Much like my feelings on Madame Sun predicting the future and telling fortunes, I wasn’t that impressed by my older brother’s displeasure.

Only a few years separated us. Well, a few years and quite a few inches. Mike took after our mother, a small Japanese woman named Ryoko our father met while stationed overseas. Stocky and broad shouldered, Mike fended off any short jokes growing up with hard fists and an even harder head. I simply grew taller, had longer legs, and could outrun him until he gave up. I might have been the only one of us to get my dad’s brown hair and green eyes, but we’d both inherited his hot temper.

Since I wasn’t going to be running any time soon with the punctures in my thigh, Mike was going to have a distinct advantage, even if I wanted to walk away from his shit. I took the easy way out and stood up, using my height to intimidate my ruffled brother. Picking up Madame Sun’s coffee cup, I turned my back on him, then hobbled over to the sink to wash up.

He followed, an infuriated duckling trailing behind me.

“Why didn’t you call me?” Mike came up about a head short of being able to stare me down, but his nostrils flared with the intensity of rabid sunspots. “I
told
Jae—”

“Let’s agree on something, brother. You don’t
tell
Jae anything.” I shook off the excess water from my hands and wiped them on my jeans. I’d forgotten about the dog bite on the back of my thigh, and the press of my fingers on the thin bandage nearly made me yelp. “He was nice enough to pass along the message, but he’s not one of your peons. Neither am I. I’ll call you when I call you.”

“I wouldn’t have to contact Jae if you’d returned any of my calls.” Mike circled around me and helped himself to a tea bag and a cup. He filled the cup with hot water and turned around to find me already at my desk. “We need to talk.”

“We don’t need to talk.” Finally turning on my computer, I waited a few seconds for it to boot up so I could begin a case file for Madame Sun. Sure, she was a free ride, but that didn’t mean her case deserved any less attention. Also, Claudia would ship me to Siberia if she came back and the files weren’t in order.

After setting his mug down on Claudia’s computer table—well out of my reach—Mike hitched himself up onto the edge of my desk and poked me in the shoulder. I flinched, the residual pain from a gunshot wound pulsing along the point of his finger, and he had the good grace to look slightly apologetic.

“I talked to Ichiro again this morning. He wants to know how you’re doing.” Mike offered up a shrug. “I didn’t know what to tell him.”

“Dude, we’ve gone over this.” I wasn’t in the mood to go a round with Mike. My night’d run long, and my sleep was too often disturbed by the aching skin on my thigh. “Why do you have to tell him anything?”

“Because he asked about you. He’s our brother, remember?”

Ichiro. Our half brother. The one our mother raised in Japan after she supposedly died while giving birth to me.

Jesus had
nothing
on Ryoko McGinnis Tokugawa.

Mike’d been trying to shoehorn me into a relationship with Ichiro ever since we’d found out he existed. I wasn’t interested. Not now. Maybe not ever. I needed time to wrap my head around being tossed out by not just one mother but two. It hurt too much to think about, so I did what I usually did when I didn’t want to get hurt.

I avoided thinking about it.

“I’m working a case here, Mike. Do I bunny rage into your office whenever I feel like it?”

“Bunny rage?”